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In creating work informed by the field of Mad Studies, it is helpful to unpack how the mad artist is materialized through social and historical context, and in turn question what these narratives invoke. Whether through identity-based art or not, interest in the biography of the artist has persisted throughout art history. As Davis (2006) points out, the popular logic can be seen through the common belief that an artist’s life and biology are an element of the artistic work as well as a way for the audience to understand the art. However, held up through notions such as the mad creative genius and the tortured artist, this logical fallacy has historically taken shape through a hyper-focus on “biopathology” – the reading of pathology in biography (Davis, 2006, p. 244) – which ties the uptake of mad art with the legacies of the asylum. Accordingly, the aesthetic markers of the mentally ill artist are represented through symptomatology as read

through the medical model of madness. By reading mad art in this way, we disconnect it from art history and instead place it alongside therapeutic tools and processes of mental health literacy.

Considering the historical context of how this viewpoint has developed demonstrates that in fact it is not a reductionist perspective, as Davis (2006) suggests, but instead is strongly tied into the complex matrix that exists in the medicalizing of madness, mad experiences, and mad people.

Here, presented with a possible impasse, I argue that perceiving madness to be a natural cause of creativity is flawed logic at best, and it is an all-too-common way that we conceptualize the mad artist. Understanding the development of movements such as Outsider Art and Art Brut substantiates how a fascination with the mad artist as naïve, impulsive, and compulsive has come to the forefront of aesthetically positioning mad art both as a marker of difference and as

pathology. While movements such as Outsider Art and Art Brut bring mad artists into dialogue with art history, the artists are continually positioned as the Other. Through this, the mad artist is taken up as peripheral to the art world in terms of aesthetic and technical values. The impasse occurs at my efforts – within my project – to decentre disease as being a necessary element of taking up mad art and yet creating my work in conversation with an identity-based position.

However, I argue that through a careful consideration of theoretical, social, and historical context, I instead centralize (my) mad experiences as being a key component to developing a mad aesthetic as a way to politicize the role of the mad artist. Eventually this brings me to a process of dis/identifying as a mad artist and/or a process of destabilizing the notion of mad aesthetics.

To work through this difficult task of decentring disease while creating in dialogue with an identity-based position, I turn to storytelling as a critical site of theoretical exploration. Costa et al. (2012) contextualizes the use of stories within the mad community as being tied historically

to movement organizing, which highlights the political use of stories in efforts of resistance.

Over time, the act of storytelling has in turn shifted to depoliticized sites where mad stories are often commodified and appropriated in order to co-opt their messages of social change,

sanitizing them into processes of mental health literacy. This co-optation can be seen, as Russo (2012) explains, in how madness and mad artists get storied. Through research and art history, mad art is taken up, responded to, and written about in ways that depoliticize both the process and final product of making art. Russo has us consider questions of both the authority of lived experience as well as how the use of mad narratives can have negative impacts on Mad Movement organizing.

For instance, when mad stories get either repackaged or retold, they have the potential to cause damage to those who embody those lived experiences (Russo, 2012). While Russo

specifically explores this in relation to Hornstein’s academic retelling of Agnes Richter’s

experiences through the interpretation of her textile work most commonly referred to as Agnes’s Jacket, Russo further outlines how this can be considered more widely. Calling into question any

work that might utilize mad narratives without incorporating meaningful as opposed to tokenistic contributions of mad people, Russo requires us to consider the impact when stating:

[A]t a time when service users/survivors write more than just their personal stories, the exclusive focus on our narratives and on our self-help groups becomes a way to suppress our research and our academic work, which in consequence slows down the process of the development of users/survivors’ theories. (2012, p. 29)

In line with this questioning, Russo requires that we think through more than just the inclusion of mad people in established theoretical standpoints. Instead, Russo is requiring that we destabilize the way that we approach knowledge creation in order to work from a theoretical standpoint that

is not just informed by mad experiences, but that is connected into the histories of the political organizing of the Mad Movement. For the purpose of this project, I want to push this sentiment further, as it pertains to research-creation. Not only do we need to incorporate theoretical

standpoints informed by Mad Movement organizing, but we also need to consider the difference between traditional academic researchers incorporating creative practices into their

methodological toolkits and actually turning to practising artists to design and disseminate the research projects from art practices that are centralized within the work that they do. In the same way that Russo asserts that Hornstein’s work does not “change the way that knowledge about madness is produced,” I assert that much of the arts-based research currently being funded by both research and arts grants is not changing the way that knowledge about mad art is being produced.

While Russo focuses their exploration on the storying of Agnes Richter’s jacket, I want to turn to the storying of internationally renowned artist Yayoi Kusama. Kusama provides us with an example of how the storying of artists becomes so intertwined with the medical model that mental illness is materialized through the packaging of their artistic practices. While I was writing this dissertation, Kusama was attracting attention worldwide through the exhibit titled

“Infinity Mirrors.” Exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario between March 3 and May 27, 2018, the show and the artist received significant local press and other coverage meant to stir further excitement. While the fantastical aesthetics and the politics of the selfie were well documented, Claudette Abrams – visual arts manager at Workman Arts, which was one of the first Canadian arts organizations to support mad artists – was quoted in the Toronto Star (Whyte, 2018) for questioning why nothing was written about Kusama’s experiences of mental health. Given the positionality of Workman Arts, this question of course makes sense. For Abrams, the silencing

of Kusama’s mental health experiences was significant, stemming from the rhetoric that the general public is not comfortable enough talking about mental health. This particular narrative, according to the processes of mental health literacy, invokes a grave situation, as the silence is both a product of and contributor to stigma and creates barriers to accessing appropriate mental health treatments (White & Pike, 2013). Further, connecting an artist’s mental health experiences to their creative work presupposes that there is some kind of causal link to be made, one that proliferates the concept of the mad creative genius and romanticizes the relationship between madness and creativity.

However, what is not considered within this rhetoric is that the history of storying Kusama’s mental illness as a way to repackage her creative work is both troubling and

problematic. Borggreen (2001) outlines both the trajectory and implications of reading Kusama through a psychopathological lens. As Borggreen explains, while Kusama did not reference psychopathology in the early stages of her career, it has now become so pervasive that it is overwhelmingly the way that her entire body of work gets interpreted. The dominance of mental illness in the storying of both Kusama’s life and body of work is historically influenced by a significantly small number of academic and popular publications. These connections can be seen, as Borggreen explains, through the increase in “frequent mentions of her hospitalization, art as a kind of therapy, a way to control inner turmoil, objectifying/representing hallucinations and symptoms, [and] expos[ing a] primal source of psyche, origin of creativity” (p. 11–13).

What is notable is that the timeframe of the early 1980s, when Kusama first made self-referential links between her art and her experiences of mental illness, overlaps with the

heightened interest in naïve and Outsider Art in Japan, where Kusama was living at the time. It is important to keep in mind that while Kusama did reflect on the influence that mental illness had

on her creativity as well as positioning her art as therapeutic, this was not done extensively nor was it done until this specific time period. So, with this renewed interest, Kusama’s work was explicitly exhibited as Outsider Art, which Borggreen determines is inaccurate based on

Kusama’s formal training and extensive relationship with the formal art world. Due to the social context in the ’80s, the art world in Japan positioned Kusama’s work as being insider/outsider, which in turn has resulted in Kusama doing the same. And thus:

From the 80s onwards accounts of her mental condition began to dominate the story of her life and art work, and pathological terms such as obsession, auditory and visual hallucinations, manic-depressive insanity, and so on, are used to describe her childhood as well as her artistic background. (p. 37)

This shift is seen by Borggreen as denigrating Kusama’s training and conscious aesthetic decisions; in turn, this removes Kusama’s work from the particular artistic techniques and aesthetics through which she most commonly identified it, and it also depoliticizes the art by positioning it as ahistorical and asocial. Borggreen contends that the shift in reading Kusama’s work through a psychopathological lens “obscure[s] our understandings of her work” (p. 15).

Movements such as those in Deaf, disability, and mad art often focus on issues of representation, access, and inclusion, issues that could be seen as addressed through the work, curation, and exhibition of art like Kusama’s. Instead, drawing on the theoretical explorations of the Mad Movement, as documented through the field of Mad Studies and the movements of Deaf, disability, and mad art, this dissertation considers how efforts that focus on representation and inclusion only make room for narratives of madness that uphold biomedical perspectives that frame mad experiences as mental illness. For even when these narratives are read through a critical lens – for instance, Kusama’s madness has been seen through feminist critiques as an

effort of dissent (Borggreen, 2001) – the pervasiveness of the discourse of mental illness makes it impossible to contend with the pathologizing of both the artist and their artwork. The impact of this is important to contemplate alongside what it means to develop a mad aesthetic, one that transgresses the propagation of the mad artist as mentally ill.

In many ways this has led me to work through my artistic process as a way of

dis/identifying with a mad identity. Doing this is not actually a new process for me, though. As an educator, an academic, and an activist, I am often asked to speak at events about mental health. Having publicly identified myself as mad early on in various elements of my work, it has become difficult to separate that aspect from the work that I do now. When my mad experiences are centralized, I often preface my stance on sharing my story, which is that I refuse to share the story arc that most audiences are expecting. I do not speak to my histories of trauma and distress or reveal my various psychiatric diagnoses. I do not provide detailed information regarding my descent into madness, my process of seeking treatment, and my journey of recovery – as a highly educated, middle-class white woman, this is the story the public has come to expect. This is the story that anti-stigma campaigns, mental health organizations, and other mad people have taught us is the one that will address the issue of mental illness. Instead, I take the time to refuse an individualized account of my story, indicating that my personal stories are not for consumption and that the recovery narrative obscures the issues. I thus collectivize the narrative, naming institutions and systems of power as the location of the problem and storying my lived

experience as part of this process of dis/identifying while referencing the politics and organizing history of the Mad Movement. Not only does this help me to disrupt the consumption and commodification of my own mad experiences, but it also requires that the audience think more broadly about what the issue is – shifting the conversations from individual to structural.